Vulcan 607

by Rowland White

  He took his work to John Laycock and the two men talked through every point. The Station Commander didn’t need to be persuaded.

  ‘Send a signal to 1 Group,’ he told Baldwin, happy that they’d got it right. At two in the morning, the exhausted Navigator sent a ‘Personal For’ signal to Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight at Bawtry outlining their intentions. Then he headed home to Trenchard Square to try to get some sleep.

  Bob Wright, Martin Withers’ young Nav Radar, and the man who might be responsible for hitting the target, had never flown a ‘pop-up’ in his life. For that matter, until a few days earlier, he’d never dropped a 1,000lb bomb either.

  Chapter 23

  24 April 1982

  The chilling wail of an air-raid siren echoed through Stanley at eleven o’clock the next morning – the Argentinians testing their newly installed system. They were confident of providing forty minutes’ warning of any incoming attack. Plenty of time to make it to safehouses and shelters, they said. Many of the islanders weren’t so sure. A civil defence committee was quickly pulled together which issued its own typewritten instructions to the 545 residents who remained in town.

  John Smith carried food and bedding down into his shelter under the porch, while in the west of the town the walls and roof of the King Edward VII Memorial Hospital were painted with red crosses, designed to be visible from the air. Sandbags were filled and piled high around the exposed windows of the operating theatre.

  Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight returned to Waddington on Sunday. Simon Baldwin was eager to hear his reaction to the plan he’d sent to Bawtry the previous night.

  ‘What do you think of it?’ Baldwin asked, confident that had Knight had any doubts, he would not have been backward in sharing them.

  ‘It looks OK to me,’ replied the AOC, ‘but you’ll be able to ask the Chief of the Air Staff yourself. He’s coming up here tomorrow…’

  Force 7 winds, snow and sleet couldn’t dampen the mood in Stanley. At five o’clock in the afternoon, the BBC had reported news of the Argentine surrender on South Georgia. After the dreadful setbacks on Fortuna Glacier, the recapture itself had turned out to be an anti-climax.

  With a single sweep of the radar, Humphrey’s Observer picked up a faint radar contact north of Grytviken. Checking against the known positions of icebergs, he gave his pilot, Ian Stanley, a new heading and the Wessex set course to investigate. It was the source of the intelligence reports from the previous day that had so rattled the Antrim group: the Argentine submarine Santa Fé. She’d been caught on the surface. Humphrey dived to attack her from behind with two Mk 11 depth charges. Her stern was lifted out of the water by the explosions. Lucky to have survived the first attack, the hunted boat turned back towards South Georgia, trailing oil. Helicopters from the rest of the small British task group then joined the attack, assaulting the lame submarine with Mk 46 torpedoes, AS12 wire-guided missiles and general purpose machine-guns fired from the cabin doors. One of the Fleet Air Arm pilots even unclipped his Browning 9mm automatic to take potshots at the submarine’s black hull, before thinking better of it and replacing the pistol in its holster.

  After days of phoney war, the attack on the Santa Fé became the trigger for British action. Her chaotic arrival back at the British Antarctic Survey jetty, hounded all the way by the swarm of helicopters, caused confusion amongst the Argentine forces on the ground. Rather than wait for the Royal Marines of the ‘Mighty Munch’ holding off 200 miles away onboard RFA Tidespring, the British command decided to take advantage of the confusion using the seventy-four soldiers who could be mustered from the ships already standing off the island. While the 4.5-inch guns of Antrim and Plymouth provided naval gunfire support, the ad hoc force of Marines and special forces troopers was shuttled in by helicopter. As they gathered themselves to launch an assault on the Argentine defenders, the white flags went up. If there had ever been any will to fight amongst the occupiers, it was undone by an intimidating barrage of fire so unrelenting that the heat generated caused the grey paint on Antrim’s gun barrels to flake off and expose the metal below. South Georgia had, after setbacks which threatened the momentum of the whole British campaign in the South Atlantic, been retaken without loss of life.

  In Buenos Aires, the junta took it badly, protesting indignantly to the UN Security Council that the British had ‘perpetrated an act of armed aggression against the South Georgia islands, which form part of Argentine territory’.

  And on the Falklands, the military build-up continued. But the occupiers were jumpier now. Less certain, thought the islanders. More aggressive. The influence of men like Dowling was in the ascendant.

  The Río del Plata set sail from Bilbao in north-west Spain on 15 April and headed south into the Atlantic. At 10.45 on 26 April, as the Argentine freighter closed on Ascension, a signal arrived on the island from Northwood telling them she was on her way and that, while in Spain, it was possible that she had taken on a force of Argentine Commandos.

  If South Georgia was important for political reasons, the vital strategic importance of Ascension Island was of a different measure altogether. While Jerry Price’s concern was inevitably less acute than Woodward’s fear of losing a carrier, he knew that Ascension’s security was equally crucial to success. Should anything happen to the airhead, the British campaign would come to an ignominious halt. The Argentinians, he thought, must see that too. Despite the colony’s extreme geographical isolation, what they might be able to do to threaten Wideawake was a subject taken very seriously indeed. A 200-mile terminal exclusion zone, patrolled by the Nimrods, was established around the island. The boundary carried no legal force, however. It was little more than a tripwire. Since early in April, the Zaporozhive, a Soviet ‘Primorye’ Class spy trawler, had sat within it, just eighty miles to the north. Listening. A British helicopter was sent out to wave a bottle of whisky at its deprived crew, but neither that, nor an accidentally-on-purpose attempt to blow down its aerials with the rotor downwash put them off. And the huge silver-winged Tupolev Tu-95 Bears operating out of Africa continued to fly close to the island. Unsure whether or not Soviet intelligence might be finding its way into the hands of the Argentinians, or whether a high-flying radar contact or approaching ship was friend or foe, the British on Ascension had always to assume the worst.

  Northwood authorized the use of Task Group 317 – the British amphibious force on board HMS Fearless, still lying off the coast – to defend Ascension against the potential threat of the Río del Plata. As a result, Marines were posted as lookouts on vantage points across the island, while a joint Royal Navy and Marine team swept the boundary to the north-west and the SBS checked the beaches. While the island was secured, all incoming transport flights were stopped. The only thing airborne was the Nimrod MR2 combing the seas around Ascension.

  The RAF contingent were given daily intelligence briefings. GCHQ had always maintained a presence on Ascension and the Victor detachment looked forward to the arrival of the man from Britain’s signals intelligence agency arriving at Wideawake on his bicycle. It was always the potential threats to Ascension that most held Jeremy Price’s attention. Two more Victors had flown in today. Half of the RAF’s entire tanker fleet was now tesselated around the small Wideawake pan.

  Faced with the difficulties of operating its frontline attack jets out of BAM Malvinas, in early April the Comando Aviación Naval Argentina decided to deploy its Aermacchi MB339s. These little Italian-built weapons trainers didn’t carry the punch of the Skyhawks and Super Étendards, but armed with 30mm cannons and 5-inch Zuni rockets, the unit’s CO, Capitan de Corbeta Carlos Molteni, believed 1 Escuadrilla Aeronaval de Ataque could pose a genuine threat to British ships. By 26 April, four of the single-engined jets were in place, parked on improvised wooden planking near the eastern threshold of the runway. The Argentinians now had an aircraft capable of mounting offensive air operations flying out of the Falklands themselves. The need to disable the airfield was even more pressing.

/>   Chapter 24

  26 April 1982

  It quickly became known as the ‘Star Chamber’, the day the RAF’s top brass arrived at Waddington for a targeting conference. Led by the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Michael Beetham, some of the service’s most senior officers were ushered into John Laycock’s office and settled around the table. Laycock and Simon Baldwin then set out their stall.

  The Station Commander sat down opposite Beetham. To his left was Simon Baldwin. Beyond him, almost out of Laycock’s view was the Commander-in-Chief Strike Command, Air Marshal Sir Keith Williamson. AOC 1 Group, Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight, was back down from Bawtry and Air Marshal Sir John Curtiss, the CORPORATE Air Commander, had joined them from Northwood. There were a lot of stripes in the room. John Laycock opened the debate by simply asking exactly what it was the Chief of the Air Staff wanted the Vulcan crews to do. Beetham’s reply was straightforward and unequivocal: ‘To prevent the Argentine Air Force from using the runway at Stanley airport.’

  Now Laycock and Baldwin felt they were on safe ground. Even though it was not what the crews had so far been training for, they now knew that it had to be a medium-level attack with ballistic 1,000lb iron bombs. It was the only way to put deep craters in the ground. Laycock described their plan, explaining how and why they’d reached their conclusions. They knew that Beetham and Curtiss, both ex-Second World War heavy-bomber crew, would see their logic. And Knight had already discussed the attack profile with Baldwin the previous day. But it didn’t seem to be what C-in-C Strike was expecting to hear. The only man in the room with a background flying fighters, Sir Keith Williamson wouldn’t have had any personal experience of what the two Waddington men were describing. As a consequence, he appeared reluctant to accept that what Baldwin and Laycock were suggesting could be the best way. And it did fly in the face of what had almost become a sacred cow for the RAF: that going in low over the target was the only way for the bombers to do their work. The RAF’s entire attack force of Buccaneers, Jaguars, Harriers and now Tornados – all under Williamson’s command – was built on that foundation. Wrong-footed, he questioned the wisdom of the return to such a classic attack profile. Laycock turned to Beetham for support, frustrated that what he knew made sense was being undermined.

  ‘It sounds very sensible to me,’ Beetham said quietly. ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Thank you, CAS,’ said Laycock, reassured.

  Beetham asked about the size of the craters they could expect, but Baldwin, his career spent training to drop nuclear, not conventional bombs, struggled to give him detail on that. He felt fortunate the CAS was an ex-bomber man.

  ‘Can we do it?’ asked Beetham, finally. Since Monty’s broken probe two days earlier, Martin Withers and Dick Russell had flown with the modification to the valve – with a probe that hadn’t carried the weight of a full fuel hose on the ground. It had gone without incident, but it would have been rash to dismiss the difficulties of the past two weeks on the strength of one sortie. Laycock and Baldwin sounded confident, but realistic.

  ‘If everything works, we’ve got a chance, sir. If the gods are with us, yes.’

  The four senior officers retreated into conference to discuss what they’d been told. Keith Williamson wanted his staff at Strike Command to examine the plan. Beetham and Knight supported that and suggested that the Air Warfare College at Cranwell might also take a look. The target had been confirmed. Laycock and Baldwin had explained the only effective way to attack it using the resources available to them, but the plan still needed to be rubber-stamped.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Baldwin encouraged Laycock, ‘I know the guys at Cranwell will come through.’

  It was time for ‘their air-ships’ to meet the crews.

  Monty was trying to get some sleep when the phone rang. It was Simon Baldwin.

  ‘Monty, could you come over to the Ops block?’

  ‘Simon, I’m in bed. I’m tired,’ Monty complained.

  ‘No you’re not, Mont. Now!’ Baldwin insisted.

  Monty hauled himself out of bed and headed over. All the CORPORATE crews had been mustered in the main briefing room for the occasion.

  As Beetham was introduced to the crew members in turn, John Reeve tried to engage him.

  ‘I told him there’d be a promotion in all of this,’ he joked, indicating his co-pilot, Don Dibbens. Reeve was making light of Dibbens’ recent, routine promotion, which just happened to have come through since the training had begun. Dibbens cringed. Beetham greeted the remark with a thin smile, but, when introduced to Reeve himself, looked as if he had been about to say something before stopping himself.

  The Vulcan crews took their seats for the briefing. As they got settled, not all of them had their minds on the briefing to follow. Martin Withers’ co-pilot, Pete Taylor, couldn’t help puzzling about the Chief of the Air Staff’s blue socks. Shouldn’t they be black?, he pondered.

  Then Beetham began to speak. He knew the way aircrews’ minds worked, knew that however lofty his own rank, they were a tough audience. Their hard-to-impress self-confidence was a vital part of what they did. But Beetham also understood the way they might be feeling now, as combat drew nearer. The veteran of Bomber Harris’s Second World War strategic bombing campaign had been there himself, nearly forty years earlier.

  Now he was addressing a new generation of bomber crews. Their target, he told them, was the runway at Port Stanley airport. Furthermore, he told them, the raid was a powerful political statement. ‘We cannot be seen to be losing,’ he stressed. Beetham didn’t need to wait for confirmation from Cranwell. He explained that they would be going in low, before a pop-up to 8,000 feet for the bomb-run. They’d be supported on the journey south by a fleet of Victors, then one of them would be on their own.

  Monty didn’t like it. We’re the boys for low level, he thought. They’d been to RED FLAG. They’d spent the last two weeks taking the jets down as low as they dared. And now they were going in at medium level. Reeve shared his irritation. First they’d needed new navigation equipment. Then they learnt that the jamming equipment they’d depended on probably wasn’t up to the job. Now, he was being told that the bombs wouldn’t work if they were dropped at low level. Why had this all been discovered in the last two weeks? It seemed to him that no one had taken the Vulcans seriously for ten years or more. But Reeve was pragmatic. He certainly wasn’t going to waste time worrying about it. If you want me to be ready, he thought, I’ll be ready.

  When they were asked at the end if there were any volunteers, Reeve stuck up his hand.

  Martin Withers was surprised about the decision to go in at medium level, too, but he felt less like challenging it than making sure of it. The news came as an almost overwhelming relief. Since speculation about their target had begun, he’d been burdened by a huge sense of vulnerability. Flying straight and level at a few hundred feet down the length of a heavily defended runway had always felt to him like a one-way ticket. A few words from Beetham had changed everything.

  ‘Are there any problems?’ Beetham finished. A question to which there was only one answer.

  Monty hesitated. Unlike Withers, he hadn’t flown since breaking his probe and losing the engines. He didn’t know that things were looking more hopeful. So he stood up, and the room turned to watch.

  ‘We’re all keen to get on with it,’ Monty began, his frustration finding a voice, ‘but until we’ve solved the problem of the probes, we’re not going anywhere, because we can’t refuel in the dark for more than five or six minutes.’

  The look he received from Air Vice-Marshal Mike Knight was chilling. He realized immediately that he had played it all wrong. He should have said something to John Laycock privately. Not here, not in front of the Chief of the Air Staff. All of the senior men knew about the refuelling problems. They’d also just been reassured by Laycock and Baldwin that, hopefully, the worst was behind them. Monty’s contribution was unnecessary and unwelcome. He felt he’d done the right thing, but he also couldn’
t help feeling that it was the sort of faux pas that would be remembered. As the crews shuffled out of the Main Briefing Room, Martin Withers leaned over.

  ‘That’s you buggered, Mont,’ he joked, trying to make light of it, but Monty was inclined to agree. His gloom wasn’t helped by John Reeve’s evident enthusiasm. Beetham’s words seemed to have had a stirring effect on him. At this point, Monty thought, John would flap his wings down to the South Atlantic.

  In the end, Monty’s pessimism didn’t greatly affect the mood of the meeting. Beetham had the reassurances he needed to brief the War Cabinet in detail and the crews, if tired, were, he felt, in good heart. Before the Chief of the Air Staff returned to London, there was just one more thing Laycock hoped to get a steer on. He was still working on the assumption that a big disbandment ceremony for the remaining Vulcan squadrons was expected on 1 July. Already frustrated by the distractions of the parade through Lincoln and IX Squadron’s imminent transformation into a Tornado squadron, Laycock asked if it was really necessary.

  ‘I wouldn’t expend too much energy on it, if I were you…’ Beetham told him.

  Just the reply the genial Station Commander had hoped for.

  As soon as the Air Marshals had departed, Simon Baldwin gathered his Ops team and described the new plan. They would need to completely revise the work they’d done so far, changing the attack profile to the medium-level pop-up, the attack track to 35 degrees off the runway heading, look again at the radar offsets now that the Vulcan would be approaching the target from the north-east and work out new stick-spacings that would ensure they could take out the runway from 8,000 feet.